Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

Negotiating API versions via HTTP Accept headers

The version as part of the route approach works fine if we assume that the API server is always supporting the latest API version. In this scenario, the client can simply select the highest version that it can work with without any concern about the server hosting the API. What if this assumption does not hold?

Let's say that we are developing a chat server that users can download and deploy on their own infrastructure. Besides the chat server package, we also develop and maintain the official client for connecting to the chat server. The chat server exposes an API endpoint with a /messages/:channel path, which clients can invoke to obtain a list of messages for a particular channel.

In version ...